A Comprehensive Routing and Extension Solution for Avid's New State of the Art Customer Center

CHALLENGE

Avid creates the digital audio and video technology used to make the most listened to, most watched and most loved media in the world – from the most prestigious and award-winning feature films, music recordings, television shows, live concert tours and news broadcasts, to music and movies made at home. The Avid Centre of Excellence, ACE, is Avid's new state-of-the-art Customer Center based in the EMEA Headquarters, at the famous Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom. It was opened on March 18th 2010.

ACE is a purpose-built dedicated floor of customer facing demo and meeting spaces. It is designed to showcase all of Avid’s audio, video and consumer products. Built with a full HD and 3Gb/s infrastructure, Avid’s challenge was to make the space flexible and configurable in order to demonstrate anything, from point products to complete broadcast/post workflows for a variety of audience sizes.

Avid needed a switching and extension solution that could handle the high resolution images (1920 x 1200) that they work with. It was critical that the solution they chose could transport every frame of a video stream seamlessly, with no compression or dropped frames. In addition, all high speed peripherals needed to function without latency.

SOLUTION

Thinklogical provided Avid with the switching and extension technology in order to back rack and centralize their critical computing resources, in a secure climate controlled machine room, and allocate them as needed. Thus, allowing users to access these computers from a variety of locations at the ACE facility. End users now have an environment that is free from the heat and noise of computers and demonstration and collaboration is now possible without any major redeployment of equipment or infrastructure redesign.

By implementing Thinklogical’s Velocity line of KVM and video extenders Avid was able to maintain pristine video quality over fiber extension. When combined with our VX Router, the system leverages 6.25Gbps of bandwidth, delivering unprecedented power and performance. Avid is now able to route and switch virtually all of their sources to a variety of destinations with ease.